'Cecilia Beaux' at Pennsylvania Academy

Cecilia Beaux: An artist under the influence

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) is often compared to John Singer Sargent in the exhibition now on display at the Pennsylvania Academy, but it seems to me that the more accurate comparison would be between Beaux and Thomas Eakins, who directed the Academy while Beaux was a student there.

Sargent was much more the bravura artist, one who gloried in his technique and whose portraits all contain a strongly theatrical component. While Beaux certainly made her name as a portraitist, her portraits are earnest, not showy.

True, she tends to smooth out the blemishes of her sitters—but then what professional portraitist of the 19th Century didn’t? There is an element of frankness, a “plain-speaking” quality to Beaux portraits that I find present in the portraits of Eakins as well.

But I don’t want to imply that Beaux was a Johnny-one-note artist. Many of her earlier works, dating from the 1880s, contain more color than her later works and are clearly indebted to the then-fairly-new Impressionist movement.

Yet it is instructive to compare the finished version of Twilight Confidences, a genre painting with a Breton setting, to its small preparatory oil sketch. The finished piece has more color, but the figures are more solid, almost stodgy. By contrast, the sketch is a wonderfully crepuscular affair that fully justifies its title. I think in a way Beaux was happier with works that exhibited a low profile. She, or at least her patrons, seems to have recognized the value of understatement.

A casual society, dressed to the nines

Beaux was a society painter. She didn’t do urchins. Consequently, her Cecil Kent Drinker is the most serious little boy imaginable, while a winsome little girl named Ernesta is depicted as all but entombed in a mass of fluffy white skirts, pinafores and what-have-you. (Ernesta turns up later in the show as a serious young woman in a plumed hat.)

The adults don’t fare much better than the children. This was indeed a buttoned-up society. These vanished men and women stare out at us with all the seriousness of Roman funerary portraits. Lest we think this may have been a quirk of the artist, a photo album belonging to Cecilia Beaux is on display. It’s opened to the year 1906 and displays snapshots taken at an open-air outing. Everyone is dressed to the nines with coats, hats and neckties for the gentlemen. This was not a casual society, and Beaux was actually painting the representatives of a more progressive mindset. One shudders to think what the Frick and Mellon crowd were wearing. When Beaux presents a casual image, such as the 1896 work, At the Piano, it’s almost shocking in its tossed-off quality. (A large Chinese vase serving as a grace note to the exhibition doesn’t seem to have any connection to Cecelia Beaux but undeniably adds an appropriately somber note to the proceedings.)

The brighter New York scene

In the early years of the 20th Century, Beaux’s art undergoes another subtle transformation. She has by now deserted Philadelphia for the more cosmopolitan and patron-rich setting of New York City, and she has returned to the brighter palette of her earlier works, adopting a cleaner, more sharply defined style. This seems to have been Beaux’s answer to Modernity, and it works rather well. Her 1909 full-length portrait of Alice Davison depicts the young woman walking her dog in a snow-covered park. Whereas the earlier works— her “portraits in mahogany”— sunk the subjects into the background, the Davison portrait allows the subject to break free of the setting and come to the fore.

Similarly, Portraits in Summer, painted two years later, allows the young married couple to dominate. By 1914, when Beaux paints her close friend, Dorothea Gilder, daughter of the poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder, her style almost resembles that of the Ashcan School. With its anecdotal title After the Meeting, Beaux’s painting of Dorothea Gilder could be mistaken at a first glance for a work by Robert Henri or John Sloan. It is absolutely fresh, with glowing colors and an eye-catching composition. (The subject is presented seated in a chair in mid-conversation.) Perhaps this sitter brought out the best in the artist: As early as 1897, in her painting Dorothea in the Woods, Beaux used a slightly off-center composition and a brighter palette to achieve an evocative and mysterious mood very different from that of her more formal works.

It can be interesting to see what an artist’s palette looked like. Beaux’s palette is very neat, with only the thinnest residue of paint marring the wood. (By contrast, one suspects that Van Gogh’s palette would have resembled a bricklayer’s trowel.) “Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter” was mounted with the intention of rescuing the artist from decades of neglect. On the whole I would say that its organizers have achieved their goal.